Pixelmator

Having discovered that I can no longer use my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, now that I have installed Leopard, I have been using ArcSoft Photo Studio 4 which came bundled with a Canon scanner.
This is not a Leopard compatible piece of software but it works fine starting almost immediately when I need it.

Today I read about Pixelmator in this months issue of iCreate and also in the latest MacFormat mag. It seemed to get reasonable reviews with comparisons to Photoshop being mentioned.

Further reading online threw up such praise as "The UI is snappy and seems to retain none of the quirks or bugs from the early days" (arstechnica) and "Total Photoshop Killer" (Crunchgear) to "From what I see here, I can definitely say 'wow'" (TUAW) I thought I would give Pixelmator a spin.

Unfortunately the only thing to really get a spin was the beachball. After downloading and installing the latest release, 1.0.2, and opting for the trial version, I tried to open a small 356KB image. After two attempts to start Pixelmator it finally opened although trying to open the image caused the program to hang with the spinning beachball for a good 30 seconds before anything happened. Trying to use any edit tool would also be very slow to actually 'catch up' with what I was trying to achieve.

In the end I was just waiting for the program to actually do what I wanted it to do. Hardly the "Photoshop Killer"!

While the developers are supposed to be releasing a 'true' Leopard compatible version called Pixelmator 1.1 Kitten, this current version did not like my G5 iMac (1.5GB RAM) so I have now uninstalled it.

Back to the drawing board....